Chapter 231: The Long Haul; Part One

Thursday, May 26 to Sunday, June 12, 2005

I woke up feeling GOOD. It had been far too long since that had happened.

I sent a sight blob to check a computer for the date and time: Thursday at 1am. I checked on Prof. The light was dim, but I could see that he appeared okay. His face had filled out and he looked his normal self.

Hoping I wouldn't find them at this ridiculous time, I checked the waiting room. No loved ones, but yet another cop.

When I'd cut my hand, my non-kiatsu healing rate had been three times faster than the girls. Things seem to double with merging, so I presumably heal six times faster now. I'd been in the hospital about 2.5 days, so the equivalent of 15 days. [[The answer was roughly correct, although the logic wasn't. My previous threefold increase in healing rate was mostly due to increased subconscious control over my body, plus a little from non-deliberate ki-effects. Diminishing returns had been reached, so the latest merge's doubling of my subconscious control and fourfold increase in ki had increased my threefold healing rate to about a fourfold rate, so 2.5 days of my healing would have taken Carol or Julia about 10 days. They were young and healthy, so they were quicker healers than the average person. My 2.5 days of healing was worth about 15 days for an average person.]]

I pushed myself up in the bed, using my hands to test if my physical strength had improved from its previous pathetic level. I was a little bit clumsy because of the various bandages, splints, intravenous tubes, etc., but I wasn't weak. I'd been pretty sure I wouldn't be. I used one of my finger splints to poke the button to summon the nurse.

When she saw me sitting up, she rushed over saying, "You shouldn't be sitting up!" then proceeded to try to pull me down.

"Hold it! I didn't call you in here to wrestle with you. I would like to talk with a doctor. Would you get one for me please?"

"Once you're lying down properly."

I'd already confirmed that my strength had largely returned so it wasn't worth the argument. I allowed her to correct my position. She left the room and I followed her with a sight blob. She went back to her desk and did nothing in the way of "doctor fetching".

My initial reaction was to sit up and push the button again, but maybe she knew a doctor was going to be walking past in a minute or two. It'd be best not cause trouble as I'd need cooperation from the hospital to spend as much time with Prof as I wanted.

I decided to kill time by going back to working on the problem of how to increase my study rate to seven screens' worth. Unfortunately I didn't kill hardly any time at all, because a likely answer was immediately obvious to me, thanks to my non-time-wasting subconsciouses. I closed my eyes and created one sight blob positioned so it was looking at the wall behind me, the one with my various medical displays on it. I had my seven minds each take an eighth of the total area, and concentrated on reading only what was in their area. Some of them had nothing to read, but that didn't matter, as it was obvious from those that did that this worked. Had there been eight different computer screens in front of me, we could have read them all without any of the superimposition, flickering, or other silly problems we'd had last time. It was very easy for each mind to concentrate on their area alone, and it'd be even easier if they were discrete computer screens, because there'd be no doubt where the borders were.

The only problem I could imagine was that some of the text could be too small on the left- and right-most screens. One solution that might work was to make the sight blob MUCH bigger, to be the width of what I wanted to read, probably four screens wide by two high. I'd always made sight blobs eye-sized so far, but I doubted very much that was a requirement, and I similarly doubted that it was only that size that filled my vision in the natural seeming way that it did, as the physics of the two processes were so different.

I expanded the sight blob, curious to learn what would happen. The immediate result was that the room got a GREAT deal brighter. I opened my eyes in surprise, and saw that the room hadn't changed at all. It only took a moment to realize that the larger the sight blob, the more light it could collect. The room was only dimly lit, so the boost provided by a large sight blob made reading even easier.

The apparent change in the room's brightness had caused me to stop expanding the sight blob only partway to the final size I'd intended, so I resumed that now. The room continued to seem brighter, but a long way short of glaringly so. My minds that were tasked with reading text on the left and right ends of the blob reported that it was getting easier to read as the blob expanded sideways.

The center of the blob was also getting very close to its wall. I was curious about what would happen when it contacted. I'd assumed that the 'seeing' was being done - God knows how - by the nearest outside surface of the sight blob, just like it's the outside surface of NP that 'touches'. In a real eyeball it's the concave inside of the back of the eyeball that does the 'seeing', but that was because the front part was needed for the lens and cornea to focus the light. That wasn't the case with a sight blob, as blobs are partially transparent (when not zero luminescence) and it's obvious that they're not bending the light that passes through them. I didn't know what was the case, but it wasn't that. Thus I was curious to see what I'd see, when the seeing surface of a sight blob reached matter.

As it happened, I was the first matter reached, as I was directly under the expanding blob, and closer than the wall it was looking at. Looking down as the blob entered me what I saw was nothing: the area in contact with matter went black. I was curious to know what I'd see if I ordered the blob to start radiating light, but a four-foot diameter blob radiating yellow light in the middle of my room at night might attract rather more curiosity than I wanted, so I saved that experiment for later.

Having the bottom of the light blob overlap with my matter didn't matter, as it was easy to keep reading the wall while ignoring the region of blackness on the bottom of the blob. What did become a problem was that as the sphere expanded toward the width I wanted, it also expanded forward, and some of my minds reported that they were starting to have trouble reading their assigned material. Pleasingly, it wasn't the minds that were getting too close to the wall that were having trouble, but the minds on the ends. Through a process I didn't understand but very much appreciated, the field of vision of the blob was constrained to the same angle as my eyes normally saw [[because my subconscious got the blob to send me only what I wanted]]. That gave the light blob a field of view of 160 degrees left to right, and a slightly smaller value vertically. As the blob expanded wider and closer to the wall, the amount of wall it could see remained roughly constant, and the sides of the blob were several times farther from the wall than the middle of the blob. That resulted in the near views being magnified several times in comparison to the far views. Having the whole image fit within my brain's normal field of vision meant left and right images shrunk. The closer the nearest point of the blob approached the wall, the greater the disparity of magnifications across the sphere, to the extent that the minds reading the left and right areas of the wall were having trouble because their text was becoming too small.

Moving the entire blob back from the wall would greatly reduce the magnification ratios between the middle and ends of the blob, but it would reduce the size of everything. The text was already too small for some of the minds, so moving the blob backward was no good.

The solution was to change the shape of the blob so it wasn't a sphere. I had more control over the shape now than I'd had with four minds. It still wasn't a great deal of control, but I could make one axis half the radius of another, so I 'sucked in the stomach' of the blob, while letting its sides and height extend unrestrained. With the blob as wide as I wanted, and its front flattened, all of my minds could easily read the text in their designated areas. I was sure that I'd easily be able to read eight computer screens.

[[I lucked out with this working so easily. The human eye physically sees very little at any one instant, especially when it comes to seeing color. Obviously you think everything you can see is in color, rather than just the middle couple of degrees, so something tricky is going on. What happens is the eyeball is rapidly flicking around (it's not a regular sweep like in a TV, instead mostly depending on where in your field of view the biggest breasts are). The net result is that the 'screen' inside your brain eventually gets sent a full image, or subconsciously pretends it has. It lies to your conscious mind that it's seeing everything in color at the same time. In a nutshell, the 'screen' is FAR bigger, by several orders of magnitude, than what color image is projected onto it at any one time. I was getting the image of the whole wall sent to my brain's internal screen, where it was processed as if it was a normal image.]]

I wanted to be able to study from eight computer screens at a time, with them laid out in a grid four screens wide and two high. I knew 30" screens were 2560 x 1600 pixels, which gave them a width of 16". With the edges, call it 1.5 feet. Four screens across would be six feet. Blobs can now be up to twelve feet in diameter, so six feet was easily within my capabilities. The screens would also total about 52 inches high; call it 4.5 feet. A ratio of 4.5 : 6 was within my blob-reshaping ability, so I could roughly match my blob to the shape of my planned, eight-panel study computer, especially if the outside four screens were mounted to angle inward slightly, although not as much as an ordinary human would prefer as I'd reduce the 'stomach' of my blob. I was very happy that I'd be able to please and excite Prof so much.

#1: <What's a 30" screen?>

#6: <Huh? Don't you guys have two 30" screens on your study computer?>

#1: <We've never heard of them. Ours are 24". Those were the biggest ones available. You had 30" screens available in your dimension?>

#8: <Yeah, they were awesome! You've never heard of Dell 30" monitors?>

#1: <No. We've got two Samsung 24" screens. They're 50% taller than the 17" screen we used to have.>

#7: <The Dells were 100% taller.>

#2: <Damn! You should've brought them with you when you merged.>

#6: <If the blob can cover eight 30" screens, it can obviously cover eight 24" ones. It's only our ease of use that's going to suffer. We'll miss the big screens, but I doubt if the 24s will slow us down more than 1%.>

[[In this dimension, the Dell 30" panels were introduced at CES (Consumer Electronics Show) 2006, held in mid-January, about eight months after the current time. In the previous dimension they were introduced at CES 2005. I was curious enough to investigate why. It was because Dell had been in a legal dispute with the company that manufactured the screens, and the dispute lasted longer in one dimension than the other. I'd been hoping it was something interesting like the dimensions' sciences being out of step.]]

I was very sure that I'd be able to read eight computer screens at one time, but I made a mental note to test it more thoroughly during the day. When the ward is busier, there'll be a couple more computers in operation in the ward's central desk. I'd check I was right by placing the sight blob appropriately and assigning a mind to read each screen. I was so confident the test would work that I wouldn't have bothered had it been any bother, but I was lying in bed with nothing else to do and it was almost literally effortless. [The new (up to) eight-screen reading system passed the test "with flying colors", exactly as I'd expected.]

I shrank the big blob back to eye size, moved it under the blankets and deep into my chest. I started turning the light output up, curious if I could see anything? Nope; pitch black. I started radiating more and more yellow light, and I started seeing a yellow/red blur, but no discernible detail.

I zeroed the luminescence, moved it inside one of the machines in my room, and slowly turned up the light. I could see circuitry and casing clearly. The box was easily within six feet of me, so the range reduction effect of its having a metal casing didn't stop me from easily creating a small NP-point inside it, and lightly touching a circuit board to confirm I could. If they try to put my head inside an MRI machine, I hope they don't cost much to repair!

It was FANTASTIC that I'd be able to study seven subjects at once, and possibly eight if I could hold center while studying. That'd be difficult, as my minds tend to put all their attention on their studies, but it'd be well worth trying to do if only for its Active Centering practicing value. That could make a life-or-death difference, as it had when I'd burst a few eyeballs recently, and it could have been critical if the asshole's gun had been made of metal.

I was somewhat disappointed at the way reading multiple screens had been achieved. I'd had this idea of me walking around for the rest of my life with a sight blob hovering over my head looking behind me for danger or large-breasted girls. (I visualized the overwatch blob floating above me rather than having it mounted on the back of my head as I thought higher would give a better view down low-cut tops, and maybe for danger too.) Because I hadn't solved the superimposition problem, the overwatch blob idea wouldn't work unless I closed my eyes for the rest of my life, in which case I wouldn't see breasts, danger, or anything else in front of me.

The solution of dividing my visual image into areas of responsibility did give me an idea though. I closed my right eye, and created a sight blob looking at the monitors above me, then I tried to project its image onto JUST that area of my sight that was currently black from my right eye being closed.

The sight blob's image projected over my total 'screen', resulting in a great deal of superimposition, other than at the very outside edge of my right eye's view, where the left eye's input didn't reach. It wasn't really progress; or if it was, I needed a great deal more of it.

Ideally I'd like to be able to divide my internal screen into whatever number of pieces I wanted at the time. One large screen, the way it normally is, or more screens as required. If I had an overwatch sight blob going permanently, then I'd need to divide my screen into two. The left side (say) would have the complete vision of both my biological eyes squeezed into it, while the right side would be used for the overwatch blob. It'd be as if I was wearing glasses with an LCD screen in front of each eye and cameras on my head. My left eye would show the image looking forward. The full image too, not as if one eye was closed, as my two eyes would still be delivering binocular vision. The right eye's LCD would be showing the view to my rear, as I'm sure you've already worked out.

Ideally, if I started up more sight blobs, my vision would segment as required. If I had vision divided into four, I'd have one mind concentrate on the top left quadrant as that'd contain what our two normal eyes were seeing. The top right quadrant could be the vision of blob on overwatch, which would be supervised by one of my minds. The two lower quadrants would be for the two minds who were having sight blobs do whatever it was they wanted done.

That was the ideal situation, and probably more than I'd ever need. I'd very happily settle for being able to keep my real eyes open when I was using just one sight blob, because closing them every time was certainly going to become a real nuisance once my body wasn't immovably tied down (since discovering sight blobs I've been perpetually tied down to something: a chair, a stretcher, and now a bed). Having any sort of overwatch, or making use of sight blobs during ordinary activities, required that I learn how to use a sight blob with my real eyes open. Overcoming the superimposition or strobing problems seemed impossible (I'd call them "blind alleys" except the problem was that I was seeing too much), but squeezing my vision sideways seemed like it might be a possible solution.

I had a choice between squeezing horizontally ('pushing' in from the left or right) or vertically (from the top or bottom). Horizontally seemed the most natural because we're used to closing one and having our field of view reduce horizontally. Hopefully that meant it'd be the easiest orientation to get going.

I arbitrarily decided that when I had both normal vision and a sight blob going, I'd use the left side of my brain's 'screen' for the blob, with the right side for my eyes' vision. I rolled my head on my pillow until my left eye was obscured but my right eye was open and looking normally. I created a sight blob and tried to send its information to just my left eye's half of my brain's screen. There's a great deal of visual field overlap between my two real eyes as they don't project their images onto their own rigidly defined half of my brain's screen, but there are some left and right offsets for each eye, which I hoped made it biologically and psychologically the easiest approach.

[[It would've been better for me to squeeze my sight vertically, so the bottom half of my vision was what my real eyes were seeing, and the top half what my sight blob was seeing. For normal activities, height is not an important dimension (which is why evolution has put our eyes side by side, rather than mounting them vertically, to make estimating the horizontal positions of objects more accurate). Plus we're mostly interested in things that occur in the fairly narrow band between waist and head heights (this is especially true for boys), nearly always ignoring what's going on at foot level or above our heads. Squeezing vertically would have compacted the less useful dimension of information, rather than the most useful, and it would have enabled many of my almost-hardwired binocular instincts to operate as is, because the left/right spatial information would've remained accurate. Ideally, although it's asking a lot, I could have created more 'room' by severely vertically compacting the below-waist and above-head regions, leaving the waist-to-head band uncompacted, so everything in that important area would have looked normal.]]

I worked at it for an hour or so without making any progress. Whatever the sight blob saw was projected across the entire width of my internal screen, and because humans have vision which is so binocular, whatever eye was open had its vision displayed over nearly the full width of the screen too, causing superimposition over 90% of my combined visual image.

I tried a different approach: I turned my head so I was looking up with both eyes open. I created a sight blob exactly where my left eye was, closed my left eye, and pretended the blob WAS my left eye, including when it started flying forward and turning around. I even imagined it as the eyeball itself floating around, with the optic nerve attached. Maybe the intellectual crutch would help? As it happened, no it didn't. The superimposition problem persisted.

The next stage was to try to get the two eyes, or even either eye would be good, to compress its vision sideways. I had a feeling that was going to be very difficult to achieve, so I put it off for now to return to the topic of something else I was trying to achieve. The nurse and I had agreed over an hour ago that I'd lay down and she'd call a doctor, and one of us hadn't kept her side of the deal, so it was time to remind her.

I sat myself up in bed again, then pressed the "Call Nurse" button again.

I watched her sigh, put down her trashy romance novel, and come to my room, where she exclaimed, "What are you doing sitting up! I told you to lie down."

"No. What you said was that if I lay down you'd call a doctor for me. I've been lying down for the last hour and a half waiting for you to keep your word. Judging by the sounds of the pages turning and your sighs, your trashy romance novel is more important than your sense of honor." She'd been sitting close enough to make my hearing her possibly believable, provided she sighed very loudly.

#1: <Zing! Right between the eyes.>

After some silly blustering - stuff about the doctors not wanting to be disturbed at night, they were too busy, etc., she agreed to call the doctor if I settled down again

"Okay. I'll keep my word again."

I lay down, she left, and I watched her as she returned to her desk and placed a call. I couldn't hear what she said, but it seemed likely to be summoning a doctor for me. I reminded myself to check into "Sound Blobs" at some stage, although they seemed very unlikely to me. Every type of blob that I had used electromagnetic energy, which sound wasn't, so I was pretty sure blobs couldn't work as microphones or speakers, depriving me of the ability to really freak Julia out.

A few minutes later a doctor and the nurse arrived, saving me from calling the nurse again and threatening her with my hitting the "Code Blue" button. I told the doctor, "As soon as possible - certainly by noon today - I want to be spending all my time with Professor Williams..."

The doctor had no patience with her patient. She interrupted, "No, you're far too sick. It'll be a week or two before there's any possibility of your getting out of bed. You've had a very traumatic experience, and it's going to take your body quite a while to recover."

They turned from me, with the nurse starting to say "Sorry" to the doctor.

I strongly demanded, "EXCUSE ME. I am well aware that I've had a very traumatic experience. That's one of the things that you can't help noticing about being tortured to death. To finish what I was trying to say before you interrupted me. I said I would like to be with Prof BY NOON, not that I was insisting on going there immediately. Noon is so the hospital has time to run whatever tests you need to confirm that I'm healthy enough to at least have my bed moved into Prof's room, or to let me go there in a wheelchair. And before you raise the objection you're obviously about to, one thing I know about my body that you don't, is that it heals extremely quickly. I feel great and I believe I am healthy enough to get out of bed now, but I'm not asking for that. I'm merely asking you to run tests to confirm my health. That's not asking for the impossible is it?"

The nurse objected, "The lab only does urgent work at night so it's not fully staffed until daytime."

"So take all the samples now and put them in the line at the lab so they'll be done first thing when the extra staff arrive. Is there anything wrong with that? If it costs extra money I'll gladly pay for it out of my pocket. Prof and I were being tortured for our money, so I can easily afford whatever it costs."

The doctor conceded, "All right, I'll order some tests. We need to take several of them soon anyway."

"Thank you. But don't order 'some tests'; order damned near all of them. I don't want to wait until 10 or 11, only to be told the hospital can't make a decision because it needs to run some more tests. I'm positive that the doctor on duty before noon won't believe how healthy I am, and he or she will want to waste time dithering. I want to be with Prof as soon as possible, so please make sure you order every conceivable test, except anything to do with brain damage. I'm staying away from that."

If she'd asked me about my last comment, I had a story ready about seeing some documentaries about how it was all guesswork medicine with no ability to fix anything that was wrong anyway, so it was pointless. It wasn't a great excuse; just the best I could think of.

The doctor ordered some tests. I queried whether they were sufficient and she assured me they were. [Of course they weren't; what doctor is going to listen to a 15-year old boy? Certainly neither the one at night nor the one responsible for the decision before noon.]

I spent the rest of the early hours of the morning working on various things:

• Sound Blobs. I achieved nothing. [[For good reason, as they weren't within my capabilities. Some interesting things were, but not sound blobs. It was a pity someone hadn't left an instruction manual lying around, because I would've been able to start using some pretty cool abilities, and saved a lot of time on experiments and practicing (I had spent innumerable tedious hours using NP to push against walls and the ground to strengthen it).]]

• Simultaneous sight sources, either two sight blobs at the same time, or one blob with one or more eyes. I didn't make any progress with squeezing the images so they didn't overlap, but as a result of all my squeeze attempts I did get a bit better at concentrating on one of the two superimposed images. That wasn't my preferred solution, because it would never scale to three or more images, and it needed a lot of continuous concentration to keep track of which of the two images a mind was following. If that mind got distracted while the scene changed, he wouldn't know what to look at when his attention returned. The quick fix was to shut the other eye or blob briefly, so he could fix on the image he was interested in again. We also had to do that if the mind following the blob called another mind to look at something. The new mind needed a quick blackout from the other source to get oriented on the image it wanted to look at.

• Testing the range of my remote abilities. I explored the hospital, seeing how far away I could send sight blobs and NP-points. I quickly found that they had the same range, presuming both tests were done with the same knowledge of an area, so I concentrated on sight blobs as they were much easier to navigate with and gained far more knowledge of an area as they moved. The first few times I'd used sight blobs, they'd quickly degraded with distance, but that degradation rapidly reduced with practice, and then the improvement leveled off. The maximum range was highly variable. I could go far farther along a straight corridor than I could vertically. Three hundred feet was about my maximum range in the hospital, provided I minimized the number of corners involved, and that was after I'd spent quite a while getting familiar with the entire area. At the far end of my range the vision was so degraded as to be almost useless. It gets bad not by each pixel getting dimmer, but by pixels being displaced from where they should be, or going missing entirely. It does get dimmer, but that's a secondary effect caused by less pixels getting through.

• Kiatsu. I'd not used ki to heal myself earlier because I'd kept falling asleep. My body was no longer tired, but I didn't want to use kiatsu on my broken bones because they'd be healing far faster than normal anyway (If I knew how, it'd probably be best to slow them down!). I could use kiatsu on my internal organs. It was clear from the doctors' and nurses' comments that my organs were progressing very nicely already, but helping them along seemed like a good idea. The Aikido books had said that healing was accelerated just by projecting ki into the injured area. Neither the injured person nor the ki supplier (the same person in my case) needed to understand what was happening internally. So when I had nothing better to do, I poured ki into parts of my chest, with no idea whether I was 'hitting' anything useful or not.

[[The books about kiatsu refer to it as a "life force". In fact it's just an energy that interacts well with our consciousnesses (because ki is one half of the Consciousness-Ki duality) and with matter when given some direction to do so. I could joke with a comment like, "Fortunately, ki energy doesn't interact with our bodies the way electrical energy does!", but the reality is that life has evolved while being permanently surrounded by ki. That's been happening ever since life started as single-celled organisms, so ki's suiting life isn't a benevolent accident, but a natural consequence of evolution. By pouring ki into an area, it energizes all the cells inside the beam. Not like heating them up would make them vibrate faster, but energizing them to perform their functions better and faster. If there was an injury in the area, many of those cells would be repairing it, so energizing them got the repair work done faster. It also improved blood flow and whatever other functions were being performed inside the beam, so everything worked better. In a nutshell, kiatsu improves the body's own natural functions.]]

One thing that pleased me was that I stayed awake. I was "bright eyed and bushy tailed," as Mom would say. My body didn't suddenly decide it needed a nap, I concentrated on my various mental tasks for hours, and everything seemed to be back to 100%. More accurately, the broken bones and missing finger making me about 95% physically fine, which was more than compensated for by my being mentally either 200% compared to a week ago, or 800% compared to other people.